Copyright Chief Says Hill’s Working on User Representation in Talks on Post-SOPA Legislation
SAN FRANCISCO -- Internet users must be represented by multiple organizations separate from high-tech companies at discussions to frame congressional legislation against what are called rogue websites after the failure of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), said the chief U.S. copyright official. “It’s not going to be any one organization or one part of the sector,” said Maria Pallante, the register of copyrights. She was replying at a meeting of the Copyright Society’s Northern California chapter late Tuesday to a comment by Corynne McSherry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s intellectual-property director, that the popular uprising against SOPA was much more than the mobilization orchestrated by Google that it’s sometimes called.
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Pivotal congressional players are working on mechanisms for hearing from users, Pallante said. Capitol Hill has historically treated libraries as their proxy, but now it’s recognized that the institutions have their own interests, she said.
"Everyone has to be at the table,” Pallante said. “Where I see the issue is, everyone doesn’t agree on the problem.” A major divide is over whether a new bill should pursue a broad solution or “small steps,” she said. “I think the discussions are more political than legal,” Pallante said. She said she has “no doubt that this will be a priority” in the next Congress. “Maybe we could agree that the process was a little uglier than some, but generally speaking I don’t think this will go away.” The joke at the Copyright Office is that SOPA and PIPA -- the acronym for the Senate companion measure, the PROTECT IP Act -- will become the “most popular names for evil twins,” Pallante said. The office’s position remains that the law has gaps that call for solutions, she said.
Recriminations from the fight have had wide fallout, Pallante indicated. Lawmakers who consider themselves civil-liberties champions and were accused of censorship over SOPA and PIPA are licking their wounds, she said. “They're in no mood to talk about exceptions and limitations” to copyright enforcement, she said. Opponents of the bills raised fears that they represented an effort to chip away at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 512 notice-and-takedown safe harbor for Internet intermediaries, but “I don’t think that was the intent at the member level,” she said.
The Copyright Office is studying the creation of a new way to allow rights holders to enforce their rights when the usual route of suing in the federal courts is uneconomical, Pallante said. The work is being done at the request of Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, of the House Judiciary Committee, she said. But there are complications, Pallante said. There are worries that a small-claims mechanism would encourage nuisance suits and discourage settlements, she said. Pallante said she has heard that some federal judges would oppose a new system as an encroachment on work that the Constitution assigns to them. And having her office, which is in the Library of Congress, in charge administratively would be questionable for an agency in the legislative branch, she said. The office said in October 2011 that it expected to publish a report on the subject two years later.
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On the Google Books case, Pallante said her understanding is that the Association of American Publishers “and Google are very close to a settlement,” but the company and the Authors Guild “are not.” She used to work at the Guild. A statement emailed Wednesday from Google was consistent with Pallante’s characterization: “We're hopeful we can reach an agreement with publishers that offers great benefits to users and rightsholders alike. … [W]e are moving forward in the original litigation with the authors.” The publishers association said by email, “Best characterization is that the publisher plaintiffs and Google are making progress in resolving the issues.” The Authors Guild didn’t get back to us right away.